MY CHEESY GRADUATION

The following is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's upcoming publication, tentatively titled Demon in the Rough

Like “the news,” which today is typically administered
televisually or electronically to produce an immediate result in the brain of its
targeted “consumer,” music is also notorious for being a mood-influencer, even
to the point of altering one’s very consciousness.

As a frequent cause of
powerful psychic reverberations in collective hearts and minds, music can in
fact pose a great danger to social harmony if it is harnessed by nefarious
sources bent on bringing agitation and upset.

In contrast with such Socratic/Platonic sternness, people in
our day tend to regard maudlin musical fare with a measure of indulgence, if
not outright approval. A song that everyone would admit to being “sappy” or
“cheesy” is nevertheless praised for its evocation of emotion, as if provoking “feelings”
were some great and worthy accomplishment in and of itself.

Such a perspective
displays a mindset which subordinates consequence to the immediacy of
sensation. Yet, as with the sexual revolution, freedom is in fact NOT the
ultimate goal, esoterically speaking; rather, the elevation of the maudlin, the
sappy, and the “cheesy” results, seemingly not un-coincidentally, in a culture
of ultimate psychic enmeshment and control. Indeed, such would appear to be the
very goal of the promotion of such fare in the first place.

*************

At my elementary school in the early 1980s, it became standard practice that seventh grade graduation would, in addition to
the inclusion of the traditional playing of “Pomp And Circumstance,” also
involve the students singing two 70s pop ballads, “Do You Know?” by Diana Ross
and “Starmaker” from the movie “Fame.”

Both of these are pervasively saccharine, mawkishly melancholic
songs, meant to jerk tears from parents on the occasion of watching their kids
receiving their grade school diplomas. They both evoke a tragic mood without much,
if any, substance or context provided. Again, emotion trumps coherence. In the
Ross song, the speaker high-pitchedly warbles:

Do you know where
you’re going to?Do you like the things that life is showing you?Where are you going to, do you know?Do you get what you’re
hoping for, when you look behind you there’s no open door?What are you hoping for, do you know?

It is never clear just why these questions are being asked,
or who is asking them, or the conditions under which these inquiries are being
made. Of course, questions of general orientation and self-awareness are
perfectly normal, even healthy, for any thoughtful person. Here, however, they seem designed not to
enhance needful introspection, but rather to create a mood of needlessly cloying
sadness in the listener.

“Starmaker,” for its part, is still less coherent. There,
the collective speaker (a different voice sings every line of the verses)
expresses some vague species of regret, despair, and helplessness:

Here, as I watch the
time go byHow I’d like to sail
away, leaving all my past behindBut I know I’d only
last for a couple of daysHere stands everything
I thought I madeIt’s the only life I
know, and I can’t even call it my ownI’ve got no hope…

The chorus of the song, however, lavishes worshipful
attention upon some kind of impersonal celestial force which it terms the
“Starmaker.” The collective speakers in the chorus claim, paradoxically
enough, that this “Starmaker” has brought them contentment, in spite of their
previous stenuous protestations of discontent,
and despite (or perhaps because of?) the slings and arrows they claim to have
suffered at the hands of this apparently capricious being:

These lyrics have the trappings of a mind-control themed
horror story, whereby one’s dreams are “broken,” one’s soul is “taken,” and one
nevertheless afterwards forlornly experiences a kind of “happiness” that comes
of having relinquished one’s hope under repeated tortures and torments, as with
Winston Smith learning to “love Big Brother” at the conclusion of 1984.

*************

Why such lyrics would be fitting
for an elementary school graduation ceremony is frankly beyond me. How they
were supposed to work as a tearjerking finale homage in the movie “Fame” is an
even greater mystery.

Both “Do You Know” and “Starmaker” are immensely bleak
anthems of intense but entirely unfocused grief. One might, hearing these songs, have reasonably wondered if the
parents in attendance might be witnessing a funeral, rather than a
graduation. Yet in truth, these tunes were much beloved, particularly by many of the
girls in our class, who (like many women in our debased age) are drawn to what
is now commonly called “drama”… for no particular reason except to luxuriate in
unbounded emotion for sake of those intoxicating “feelz.”

Muh feelz!

I, by contrast, hated these songs immensely, and hated having to sing them
even more. Yet at the insistence of our teachers, our administrators, and of most of the graduating seventh grade
girls, I, like the rest of my class, was forced to participate.

My complaints
were dismissed, and many of the boys—who in their hearts probably disliked the
songs as much as I did—shamelessly white-knighted their female classmates, scapegoating
me with utterly odious gallantry. To impress the girls, that is, they made fun
of me for being a dork because I complained about the songs being lame and
sappy. Even back then, gynocentrism reigned and masculine simp-ism was rife.

I ultimately gave in—what choice did I really have?—yet got
a measure of revenge by rolling my eyes while singing to such an extent that my
grandmother afterwards teasingly inquired, “What were you looking at up on the
ceiling, Andy?”

*************

Today, I wish I had simply declined to sing, and had instead stood there on the stage with pursed lips and an expression of scathing
disdain, while classmates belted out those cheeseball ballads of emotional
abuse and maudlin torment.

I mean, what could they have done to me? I had earned by
diploma, and my passing forth into 8th grade wasn’t incumbent upon
my participation in any lame ceremony or singing on cue in front of an audience.
But of course I didn’t have the guts to take such a stand; being age 13, I was
particularly vulnerable to that insidious technique of manipulation which is
today called “gaslighting,” whereby a person with a legitimate grievance is
shamed into self-abnegation.

And it didn’t help that, at the time, I lacked the understanding to put my aversion to singing these songs into a larger context; to me, it just
felt wrong, like an obscenity
perpetrated against my spirit. Yet however deeply this intimation struck me
then, I could not articulate its appalling outrageousness while still a mere
child feeling my way through a world that had suddenly turned prickly, cold, and treacherous.